Love Changes Everything

"I am here to remind you that without love, your MoonQuest cannot succeed."
~ The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy

Love will turn your world around, and that world will last forever / Yes, love, love changes everything ... Nothing in the world will ever be the same.
~ from Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Aspects of Love"


Saturday, March 21 ~ Gallup, New Mexico

The black jeep drives out of Denny's parking lot, my daughter Guinevere waving from the back seat. It turns south on Muñoz Drive, then west on I-40 on its way back to Sedona, Arizona.

For ten minutes, I sit numbly in my car, unable to turn the key in the ignition and follow Muñoz to I-40's eastbound ramp, for the two-and-a-half-hour trip home to Albuquerque. When I do, it's a long time before I can turn on the radio or call a friend, the two distractions that often ease long drives for me.

Today, I need silence.

I've experienced many versions of this sadness since December 2004, when I drove out of Sedona in the wake of a marriage breakup and launched the odyssey that ultimately landed me here in New Mexico. But this is one of the most intense, and it takes me several days to figure out why.

Over the next two days, Guinevere emails me a half-dozen YouTube video clips from Easter Parade, Meet Me in St. Louis and Singin' in the Rain, the three classic movie musicals I introduced her to during our March Break visit, each accompanied by a love note. But, unusually, I don't hear from her at bedtime.

On the third night, I call. Her mom explains: Guinevere was more distraught than usual at leaving me and was afraid that talking to me would make her even more upset.

I understand. In those early months after I first left Sedona, I too hesitated to call Guinevere some nights for the same reason.

The next night, I have a seemingly unrelated experience: Someone I would never have considered pursuing romantically because of the yawning gap in our ages, pushes many of my buttons by flirting with me.

My first instinct is to recoil. Then I remember both the counsel I've given friends on that same topic in recent months and words I wrote just two weeks earlier in an online discussion thread on the subject. I was writing about two men. But the words apply to any two potential mates, regardless of gender or orientation:

"It's not age difference by itself that presents the potential problem," I wrote. "It's differences in maturity, psychology, life experience, goals, energy levels and interests that can get in the way. Sure, age differences can exacerbate those issues. But the same issues can easily arise between two men who are the same age.

"Dating someone young enough to be my son would push all sorts of buttons for me. But I wouldn't walk away from the potential for a deep, abiding love based on numbers alone. Love is too rare and special to make up artificial rules that ignore the mystical, magical illogic of the human heart.

"When love comes calling, I'm not going to ask for a birth certificate. I'm going to explore the heart connections that make love so wondrous."

When love comes calling....

Suddenly, I realize that what I've been experiencing is isn't only about me and Guinevere. Nor does it really have anything to do with this guy, who for reasons other than age may not be mate material. It's about how open I truly am to love -- however it chooses to come calling, whatever form it takes.

Back in January, I overcame some of my antipathy to The Secret movie and watched it again. The most profound thing it left me with was a call to write out all the things I was grateful for -- both those already visible in my life and those I desired but had yet to see or experience. The result was a comprehensive, four-page, ever-evolving list of statements related to every aspect of my personal, professional, creative and financial life.

I've been reading it aloud daily ever since.

When, Tuesday night, I get off the phone first with Guinevere and then with this young guy, I run to the computer and add this gratitude/joy statement to the others:

"I am so happy, joyous and grateful, now that I fully embrace and am unconditionally open to all the love directed toward me and flowing to me -- now and in all dimensions of time and space."

At first I think it's only about allowing myself to feel the fullness of my daughter's love and allowing myself to let in the kind of "loving, physically intimate and committed relationship" I've described in one of my other gratitude/joy statements. Then I realize that, as the Beatles so simply put it, "love is all there is."

Love is the energy that fuels everything and is the true source of every item on my four-page list. The only way to achieve my personal, professional, creative and financial goals is to keep opening my heart wider and wider to receive that love, however it comes calling.

The more open-hearted and vulnerable I can become, the more I can allow love in all its forms to touch and transform me. These forms can include the words of my next novel as much as the success of this one. They can include financial freedom as much as loving relationships.

They can also include pain.

The love from an unexpected source that led to my marriage became the pain of its dissolution. The joy of a week with my daughter is also the heartache of our parting.

What last week reminded me was that love can bring pain as well as joy, and that unless I'm open to a full experience of love's pain, I will never experience the heights of its joy and passion.

It also reminded me that the best inner and outer work I can be doing in these times of intense upheaval involves not only keeping my heart open but doing everything in my power to open it yet more...and more...and more -- to myself, to everyone else and to all the ways love presents itself, even if they're potentially painful to me or to someone else.

When love comes calling, whatever form it takes, I choose to be the open vessel that welcomes it and allows it to fill me with all my heart desires -- the four pages' worth that I know about as well as the infinite realms of desire I cannot yet begin to imagine.

Love does change everything. Everything.

I'm now ready to embrace it. Unconditionally.

Are you?

Please share your thoughts here.

Trust. Now.

Friday, August 8 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

Mistrust has deformed this land,
twisting it until lies are truth and truth is a lie,
embedding it with layers of fear so thick
even the brightest light can't pierce through. ...
It has spread so subtly we don’t even see it.
Yet it's there. And it must be stopped.
We must stop it and begin again.
~ The MoonQuest

How do we begin again? By trusting ourselves.

From there, we regain trust in our highest God selves. Then we regain trust in each other.

We trust what we know. We trust what we see. We trust in the possibility of the impossible. We trust in love.


"You either trust or you do not," M’nor stated. "There is no halfway in between."
~ The MoonQuest


Where do you still not trust yourself? Where do you still not trust others? Where do you doubt that you're capable of miracles?

How can you more fully surrender to your highest God self and trust your alchemical power to bring Heaven on Earth into your life? Beginning today.

The MoonQuest is available at selected retailers across the U.S. and through various online sites, including Amazon.com and LightLines Media.

The Best of...

Saturday, July 26 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

It’s hard to believe that these New Earth Chronicles have been around for 30 months and that this is the 148th post.

I was mighty resistant in January 2006 when I first felt the call to blog. At the time, I knew nothing about blogs. Didn’t much want to know, either.

But 14 months into a full-time road odyssey that had already twice carried me coast-to-coast, I felt as though a blog would be the perfect way to share my journeying -- using a medium that was more personal and immediate than the newsletter it would supplement.

My remaining doubts dissolved a few days later, when I learned that the next meeting of the Albuquerque-based Southwest Writers group would offer an introduction to blogging. Talk about perfect timing. I drove down from Santa Fe for the meeting and a few days later, this New Earth Chronicles blog was born.

Since then, this blog has followed me across the U.S. and into Canada as I've chronicled my experiences of this New Earth we're all birthing -- each in our own way, each in our own lives.

Although my chronicles of the road ended in August when I dropped anchor here in Albuquerque, my New Earth experiences have continued, as have these chronicles.

Here are a few highlights...

• February 2006 ~ Santa Fe, NM -- Love Beyond Love...from a Place Beyond all Understanding

• June 2006 ~ Palm Desert CA --What's It All About, Alfie?

• October 2006 ~ Hillside, VA -- D(r)ving into Different States

• November 2006 ~ Dalton, GA -- Family Lies, Family Ties

• December 2006 ~ Ojai, CA -- Aligned with the Flow That only Passion Can Activate

• January 2007 ~ Thousand Oaks, CA -- An Eye for the Right Life

• May 2007 ~ Santa Fe, NM -- A Horse (or Two) of a Different Color

• July 2007 ~ Sedona, AZ -- Use Me

• October 2007 ~ Santa Fe, NM -- Deeper Levels of Trust

• January 2008 ~ Albuquerque, NM -- Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?

• February 2008 ~ Albuquerque, NM -- The Alchemy of Creation

• March 2008 ~ Albuquerque, NM -- Don't Fence Me In

• May 2008 ~ Albuquerque, NM -- It Only Takes a Moment

I also now have a second blog, The Voice of Your Muse, a source of tools, tips and inspiration for writers. If you haven't already, please check it out.

Photos by Mark David Gerson: #1, from The Heart of Texas (August 2007); #2, from Desert Spring (June 2007)